95: Follow the Incentives

Good call on the Dalio privacy coin take- I think you might be on to something

Thanks for the signal Chris, as always. Can you help us understand the game theory for BIP110 in relation to mining. If they have very low hashrate (<10%) can this still cause a disruption and potential chain split? My initial thoughts were that they won’t get a significant amount of hash so it will just die on the vine. But the proponents of 110 are talking like they can still force a counter fork if they have minority hash. Maybe I’ve got this wrong so can you talk us through this pls.

You deserve more V for your V, but I'm facing some personal liquidity challenges at the moment. Where I work, they stopped hiring SW graduates a few years ago. I don't think they planned to switch to AI, it was just a desperate measure. Now they're pivoting hard to agentic coding.

Thanks for the value

Thank you again for another breakdown of how ludicrous BIP-110 is. I used to be in the Knots camp, but once they moved from a node implementation to attempting to change consensus, they lost me completely. Plus the lynch mob tactics, rushed nature of the bip, and how it could stain the Bitcoin brand and even damage parts of the network, I’ll pass from joining this cult. Great work as always Chris!

I just used opencode with their free model to unpin then remove a bunch of pinned but unsupported flatpaks. At work I've been using GitHub copilot for a year or so. So far it is just making me slightly more productive. However more important is I will more often try things I'm less familiar with because the cost of trying them is a couple minutes writing a prompt. For example I added dark mode to an internal JavaScript site on a Friday afternoon. It took hours overall, my 1st time using JavaScript, but the 1st prompt gave immediate results and I got hooked.

Appreciate the description of how PR articles become news.

🫡🥩🍳🍄💪🙏

Nice!

Love your reports, thanks for the work you do to keep me informed. And, I disagree with your take in UBI. Bitcoin and UBI will work very well together. Andrew Yang doesn’t want to tax the robots to pay people to stay home. The stay home narrative is 100% incorrect about UBI and you’re being spun by the same corporate, billionaire systems that are fighting Bitcoin. We have a common enemy. Think of UBI as a floor, not a safety net, or an income replacement. No one is sitting at home smoking weed and playing video games on 2K a month. They might very well save up for a while and leave their shitty job and start a small business, get trained for something else, or stay home with their young children; again nobody is leaving the workforce completely for 2K a month. I’d love to talk to you more about this or put you in touch with people I follow more able to speak to it. UBI and Bitcoin are both huge low time preference reinforcing mechanisms. They are complimentary, not competitive. So many bitcoiners will say you need to spend 100 hours learning about bitcoin, I would argue UBI needs a similar commitment, and if you haven’t committed to that level of study you’re in danger of sounding like a no coiner rhyming off classic fud about bitcoin like it’s money for criminals, and it’s not attached to anything, and it’s a Ponzi scheme. Be well sir, keep up the fantastic reporting on Bitcoin, and if you can make the time let’s explore the power of a UBI for individuals. It kind of makes individuals as powerful as a union can without the complexity of another large institution. Imagine what you would do if you were in a shitty job and then you started getting 2K a month consistently, for the foreseeable future, not clawed back if you continued working, or making income in any way. What would you tell your employer to do with that job :-). Cheers

TWiB is back! While I was away there was some fresh FUD, so between that, new inflation data, and Bitcoin observations from my trips it’s a packed episode. Enjoy 🍻